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NATURE NOTES 
according to the Earl of Stamford, records that it does ; or 
whether Professor Bell is right in identifying it as that of the 
Rev. Richard Yalden. If the identification of Thomas Holt 
White, Gilbert’s brother, is wrong, of which I have little doubt, 
then the whole conception of the portraits depicted in the picture 
may be wrong also. 
The figure of the clergyman in the “ frontispiece ” must, 
however, be taken in connection with another picture in the 
original edition. Facing p. 345, is a plate of the “ Pleystow, 
vulg. the Plestor.” This picture is not enumerated by Gilbert 
White as having been one of the twelve drawn by Grimm 
in 1776. 
It was probably drawn at a later date, but in Mr. Holt- 
White’s “ Life and Letters ” there is no record of Grimm 
having visited Selborne at a later period than 1776. Seated on 
the bench is the figure of a man, apparently a clergyman, with 
a dog — a long-eared Spaniel. If, as is probable, this plate of 
the “ Plestor ” was drawn at a subsequent period to the others, 
some of which took some years to engrave — for we find that in 
February, 1788, the “great N.E. view of Selborne” was not 
yet finished (Holt-White, “ Life,” ii., pp. 180, 181) — it may 
have been completed shortly before the publication of the book. 
In this case, the picture is one of great interest. The preface 
to the first edition bears the date of January 18, 1788, and the 
book was published in 1789, but copies must have been ready 
for distribution at the end of 1788, since Harry White received 
his copy at Fyfield on December 3 in that year. 
Writing in 1792, ten months before his death, to Robert 
Marsham, he says : “ Though I have long ceased to be a sports- 
man, yet I still love a dog ; and am attended daily by a beautiful 
Spaniel with long ears, and a spotted nose and legs, who amuses 
me in my walk by sometimes springing a pheasant, or partridge, 
and seldom by flushing a woodcock, of late become with us a 
very rare bird.” 
The figure seated under the tree in the Plestor in Grimm's 
picture evidently “still loves a dog,” and I submit that this 
figure is intended to give us an idea of Grimm’s friend and 
patron. In introducing the figures into his“ scapes,” it is but 
natural that Grimm would endeavour to recall the appearance 
of Gilbert White in a picture of Selborne, and I contend that 
even if it be not an actual portrait, the delineation of the old 
Clergyman and his dog in the picture of the “Plestor” is 
intended for Gilbert White, and is perhaps the only real clue to 
our conception of what he may have been like in personal 
appearance. 
The pictures in my own edition of “ Selborne,” purporting 
to represent Gilbert White, are singularly unhappy, and have 
incurred the just censure of Professor Newton in Macmillan's 
Magazine for 1900. My old friend, though knowing nothing of 
the real facts of the case, does me the justice to credit the 
